Abandoned eFeeders in March.
Photographer: Rosa Panggabean/Bloomberg

Business

CEO Explains How He Faked Results in $300 Million Meltdown

Agritech venture eFishery was one of Asia’s brightest startups with money from the likes of SoftBank and Temasek. Then it all came crashing down.

By David Ramli, Olivia Poh, and Faris Mokhtar

April 15, 2025 at 12:30 AM UTC

As Gibran Huzaifah stared at the Excel spreadsheet on his laptop, he was looking into the void. eFishery, the Indonesian startup he'd built from a fish-feeding prototype to a 100-employee extension of himself, was just three months away from running out of cash.

Slowly, he started plugging fake numbers into the financial report. Within an hour, he had done what five years of hard work couldn’t — turn his business into a winner, at least on paper. He hit the send button to show his investors, certain he’d get caught.

Only he didn’t. His backers were cheered that his business was improving. They chipped in more cash, without realizing the numbers were fabricated, helping Gibran avoid his wipeout. It was at that moment in late 2018 he started building a house of cards that would eventually cost some of the world’s biggest money managers hundreds of millions of dollars.

“You see yourself in the mirror and when you do something wrong, you know that you’re not proud of yourself,” Gibran told Bloomberg News during a five-hour conversation in which he gave his most detailed public account yet of the inside workings of eFishery. “I thought I would just do it to survive.”

Six years after that move to start a second set of accounts — a real one for his team and a second, inflated book for investors — eFishery was one of Asia’s brightest startups with a valuation of $1.4 billion and around 2,000 staff. As well as providing automated fish-feeders to boost productivity, it had also expanded into financing services.

By the time it collapsed, the scheme had metastasized into a multinational web of fake shell companies and padded accounts. The company claimed revenues of $752 million in the first nine months of 2024, while the true number was just $157 million, according to an internal investigation.

Agricultural Startup "eFishery" Robotic Dispensers — Gibran Huzaifah in 2022.Photographer: Dimas Ardian/Bloomberg

The deceit ensnared several of the world’s most high-profile venture players, from Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp., Singapore’s Temasek Holdings Pte. and Sequoia India and Southeast Asia (now Peak XV) to Abu Dhabi’s 42XFund and Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social Capital. All declined or didn’t reply to requests for comment.

This account of eFishery's rise and fall is based on conversations with Gibran and over 20 eFishery investors, staff and clients. It charts how Gibran’s “fake-it-till-you-make-it” deceptions — commonplace in some corners of the startup world — spiraled into something much larger. And it delves into awkward questions about the role of ego, groupthink and how so many red flags were missed in the rush to back a startup darling. At least $300 million of investors’ money has been lost. (It’s unclear exactly how much all individual funds may have lost and it’s possible some sold shares at a higher valuation.)

Gibran says he agreed to speak to Bloomberg now because he wants to state publicly that he didn’t steal money and to make clear that the bulk of his employees weren’t aware of what was happening.

“I just want to say, my deepest apology for everyone impacted, especially the farmers because they’re the reason why I do this.”

The Starting Point

Gibran was raised near the slums of East Jakarta, the son of a construction worker father and a homemaker mother. He studied biology at the Institut Teknologi Bandung — known locally as the MIT of Indonesia. But when his family struggled financially, Gibran had to fend for himself. Food was short and he alternated between sleeping in mosques and at school, while tutoring for cash, working in a convenience store and other side hustles.

Then he signed up for a fish-farming course and, inspired, rented his own ponds. He quickly learned the reality; hard work, slim margins and fickle fish.

WATCH: CEO explains how he faked results in $300 million meltdown.

Aquaculture, essentially agriculture in water, is a grueling business. Spawned eggs are nurtured in a sequence of pools before they’re released into larger ponds and fed calculated quantities of feed at specific times; too little and the fish starve, too much wastes money and can produce excess algae. After months of attention the fish must be sold and transported, sometimes live, to processing locations and buyers. Prices can fluctuate dramatically.

But Gibran was determined. He opened warungs — small eateries — where he sold cooked fish to increase his profit and lobbied grocery stores to take his stock. At his peak, he managed over 70 ponds and wanted to start a seafood restaurant chain.

“My dream when I was graduating in 2012 was to own a thousand ponds — I wanted to be the King of Catfish in Indonesia: the Rajah Lele,” he said.

Catfish at a farm in Cirebon, Indonesia, in March.Photographer: Rosa Panggabean/Bloomberg

One established farmer warned him of a big pain point in expansion: feeding becomes a real chore. So Gibran started working on an automated fish feeder, doing everything from the welding to the rudimentary software programing himself. His early design looked like the student project it was — a gleaming upturned milk bucket welded onto a funnel that gravity-fed fish food pellets onto a spinning disk. Sending a text message would open a slide to release the feed, which then scattered across the surface of the water.

“I saw the opportunity and that’s why I changed,” Gibran said. “It’s more scalable and helps more people.”

For months he rode from farm to farm down rutted roads and village paths with a prototype strapped to the back of his motorcycle. Gradually, as the first hesitant farmers got harvest gains and gave testimonials he could cite, it started to gain some traction.

To build awareness — and win cash prizes to keep the business going — he entered startup competitions in Jakarta and rapidly boned up on the ABCs of venture capital: how to create a pitch deck, sell his business model and strike the right balance of vision and financials to excite investors. A YouTube clip uploaded in October of 2013 shows a baby-faced Gibran at a floating fish-farm making the pitch that would be his hallmark till the end: the feeding process of aquaculture makes up the bulk of the industry’s costs and his product could make it much more efficient. In 2015, Aqua-Spark, a Netherlands-based investment firm specializing in sustainable aquaculture, agreed to go in on an initial fundraising of $750,000.

The First Deception

A big challenge for eFishery was the high price of its feeders versus the thin margins for small-scale fish farming. Depending on size and discounts, units could cost roughly $400 to $600. That was beyond the reach of many potential customers in Indonesia, where about 10% of the 280 million people live below the poverty line and where labor is cheap.

Gibran quickly pivoted to let farmers rent his contraptions rather than buy them. He figured he could deploy his feeders into the market more rapidly that way and recoup the costs of building them over a few years. But because he had to pay for the devices upfront, it also meant he was burning through cash.

He trawled the region’s venture capitalists for interest but was repeatedly rejected. By December 2017, the startup had just $8,142 in cash on hand, according to Singapore regulatory filings.

Aqua-Spark, though, was still interested. In May 2018, it offered to join the Series A round with $1.5 million delivered in three equal tranches. The last $500,000 would only come if other investors took part.

The deal bought him time, but still no one else agreed to join. Furthermore, Gibran says he believed he was on the hook for the first million dollars if he failed to attract other investors. Amy Novogratz, Aqua-Spark co-founder, said in a statement there was no personal liability connected to the agreement.

Dejected, he asked fellow Indonesian founders how they’d managed to raise new rounds. The tips were vague and coded, but the answer, as Gibran took it, was essentially to fudge the numbers.

“They said that they massage the numbers, that they have some ‘growth hacking’ initiatives that they do and usually they do it prior to the fundraising,” he said. “I knew it was wrong. But when everyone is doing it and they’re still doing okay and never got caught, you question if it’s really wrong.”

Gibran presents the decision that faced him as a morality problem: be honest and end up bust — or inflate the numbers and keep the show on the road for himself, employees and the farmers.

“It’s like a trolley problem and it’s never an easy choice,” he said, referring to an ethical thought experiment where the protagonist can either run over five people, or change the track and run over one. “My moral compass is quite mathematical — if the number of impacts that I can create at a given time outsizes the potential risk and damage that might be created, then it’s still a net positive and you should still do it as long as it’s a net positive.”

The Trolley Accelerates

The shift in sentiment once he emailed the new numbers was stark. The Series A fundraising was a huge success, attracting Singapore-based venture capital firm Wavemaker Partners and San Francisco-based 500 Global’s Southeast Asia fund. The round raised $4 million in total, including the third tranche from Aqua-Spark.

Now Gibran had to find ways to back up the new numbers he’d put into the spreadsheet. The first system he came up with was relatively simple. Fish farmers already bought feed and sold fish, so Gibran said he offered them a 2% to 3% payment for them to “move” their business onto eFishery’s platform.

It was an elaborate sleight of hand. For customers in the field, nothing changed. They bought and sold to the same people at the same prices, using the same systems they’d always used. But once those transactions were shifted onto eFishery’s financial statements, the startup’s revenue appeared to soar.

“It was only like a 20%, 30% tweak,” Gibran said. “But it’s important in that it shows the growth momentum and that we’re on the beginning on the hockey stick.”

A bigger gamble was a financing program called Kabayan that in theory used the startup’s aquaculture know-how to judge the credit score of harvesters and get them loans from lending platforms. The risk was supposedly limited and eFishery got a 1% to 3% commission along the way. Reality was far uglier: eFishery was responsible for the debts and default rates were high.

eFishery’s financial statements lodged in Singapore show revenue leaping from $185,405 in 2018 to about $10 million a year later — a 50-fold explosion that delighted investors. It also went from a loss to a gross profit over the same period, attracting term sheets impossible mere months earlier. With more cash came rapid expansion: apps for clients to buy fish straight from farmers and drop points across disparate islands to distribute feed and collect fish.

And it did have an impact on some farmers. Suganda, who like many Indonesians goes by one name, was one of the first in his region of Cirebon, West Java, to use the eFeeder machine. The chest-high plastic drums can hold 100kg (220lbs) of fish feed. Attached at the bottom of the barrel is a control box that determines how much feed is dispensed to the fish in the ponds. To use the machine, farmers downloaded an eFishery app, and input the feeding timings and the amount of feed to be given. (Suganda said he was never asked by Gibran to inflate any numbers.)

Fish Farming in Cirebon — Suganda was one of the first farmers in his area to use the eFeeder machine.Photographer: Rosa Panggabean/Bloomberg

“The fish ponds are huge. So you have to walk from one end to the other. When you have technology, what it did for me was it gave me a life beyond the farm,” the 54-year-old told Bloomberg News on a recent visit. “Before that my life was all about being in the farm. But with the auto feeder, I could go out, attend weddings, have a social life.”

The collaboration with eFishery also facilitated around $150,000 in loans, helping Suganda and other farmers in his Cirebon collective to grow. The number of ponds soared from 10 to 70, and his income rose by 20%, earning him up to $603 a month.

This progress came at a time in the world of startup investing when firms were looking for more help-the-world ideas. Assets in sustainable funds soared 67% to almost $1.7 trillion in 2020, according to Morningstar, as investors hunted for deals with social and environmental impact. Add in Gibran’s rags-to-riches personal story and improving financial statements, eFishery had all the hallmarks of a rising star. In 2020, Gibran took on a $20 million Series B fundraising round co-led by private equity fund Northstar Group and Go-Ventures (now Argor Capital).

Northstar and Argor declined to comment.

Money and Pride

At this stage, according to Gibran, eFishery didn’t need any more money. The pandemic even gave him the perfect way to reconcile the books; investors expected sales to suffer but the business was actually enjoying a genuine tailwind. By spinning a story about faltering growth, he planned to catch the real numbers up.

That’s when he got word that SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son wanted to speak.

It was 2021, at the height of the Covid pandemic. He wouldn’t be able to show the SoftBank team around selected fish farms in Indonesia that used his product, as he’d done with previous investors. All he had was an hour.

SoftBank CEO Son in Indonesia — Masayoshi Son, center, after meeting then-Indonesian President Joko Widodo in Jakarta, in January 2020.Source: Kyodo News/Getty Images

Sitting in his Bandung office, Gibran was nervous. Just a few years ago he was raising fish out of a rural farm in Indonesia, and now SoftBank — which had raised almost $100 billion for startup deals through its Vision Fund — was ready to validate his faith in eFishery’s future. The firm had backed China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Yahoo Japan. and Singapore’s Grab Holdings Ltd., then one of the hottest startups in Southeast Asia. Today, it was interested in him.

Son, listening in from his house in Tokyo, stopped the pitch just 15 minutes in, Gibran recounts. He was in. SoftBank’s team later sent around a term sheet that valued the business at around $200 million. Gibran was ecstatic.

SoftBank declined to comment, but a person familiar with the matter confirmed the proposed valuation.

Then, out of the blue, Sequoia India and Southeast Asia (Peak XV) sent its own proposal with a valuation of just over $300 million. Investors from Singapore’s multibillion-dollar, state-owned investor Temasek also tried to get an allocation. One day Gibran opened his WhatsApp to find a text from Temasek’s Chief Executive Officer Dilhan Pillay, which he initially thought was spam. Pillay asked for some time to chat.

Key Speakers at Temasek Foundation痴 Inaugural Philanthropic Asia Summit — Dilhan Pillay in 2021.Photographer: Ore Huiying/Bloomberg

Gibran had heard that Pillay rarely calls founders to pitch. “It was a big deal,” he said.

Temasek and Peak XV declined to comment.

Though he reveled in the attention his young startup was getting, he also spent quiet nights brooding about its shaky foundations. In 2021, eFishery told investors that it had booked 1.6 trillion rupiah ($95.3 million) in revenue, with 142 billion rupiah profit before tax. In actuality, revenue was 40% lower at 958 billion rupiah with a loss before tax of 164 billion rupiah.

Gibran said he was uncomfortable with the deceit, but his mind went back to the trolley problem. After all, he saw how some farmers benefitted from eFishery’s presence. He believed his startup made an impact. But taking this money would mean more pressure to grow, and reconciling the differences between eFishery’s two books would have to take a back seat. He was torn.

After the flurry of interest, SoftBank, Temasek and Sequoia India settled on an offer of $90 million in fresh funding at a $410 million valuation, according to Gibran, people familiar with the deal and the research service Alternatives.pe. It was a hefty sum for a young startup at the time, particularly one helmed by an inexperienced former fish salesman based in Indonesia. eFishery, worth just $12 million three years prior, was getting the recognition of the biggest investors in the world.

He took the deal.

Missed Red Flags

In hindsight, there were warning signs. The Singapore holding company ceased filing annual financial statements for years (the 2020 report wasn’t filed until 2024). More indicative was the lack of disruption in markets where eFishery claimed to be making waves. By the end of 2023, the firm supposedly had over 300,000 feeding units in the field and more than 44,000 fish and shrimp farmers buying from its platform, which should’ve had a seismic impact on the entire supply chain.

But when one investor with ties to feed producers tried to connect them with eFishery — a clear win-win for both parties — they were ghosted by Gibran. Another said Gibran was often three months or more late with basic numbers and that a party responsible for producing key components for the feeder told them it only supplied enough for at most 5,000 units per year. A separate investor was told by senior executives at Indonesia’s biggest fish feed distributors that they were confused by the total lack of change on their sales.

Following his Series C funding round, the claims and targets were so big that Gibran said he needed larger farmers with over $1 million in annual revenue for his existing method of inflation to make sense. By now he’d scoured the country and couldn’t find enough to get on board.

In early 2022, Gibran says an employee suggested a solution. By setting up a web of subsidiaries and controlling the accounts of farmers on the network, the business became so complex that transactions could be padded at will. Eventually this would expand to five separate companies with, Gibran says, over 5,000 accounts being used for transactions such as buying fish feed and selling fish.

In the meantime, he was burning through real money trying to catch up with the claims he’d given investors. The lending platform was popular with fish farmers — both the checks and the collections were relatively lax — but this also led to soaring default rates. And the app was proving to have substantial issues, which meant hiring field teams and sales matchers across the country.

By this point, the fake numbers made eFishery seem supercharged. It became a focus of write-ups in the international press, including Bloomberg News. Gibran expanded to India and quickly started reporting a profit, apparently proving the business model could go global. Abu Dhabi-based sovereign fund 42X led a Series D funding round that raised $200 million at a $1.4 billion valuation. Malaysian pension fund Kumpulan Wang Persaraan (KWAP) was one of the investors.

eFishery's Rise

As more top money managers invested, the startup's valuation soared

Source: eFishery, Alternatives.pe

Through all of these raisings, eFishery had gone through reviews by some of the world’s leading specialist investors and audit firms. Grant Thornton audited 2022 annual financial statements on the Indonesian entity while PwC was just a week away from signing off on the latest, according to three people familiar with the matter.

A spokesperson for Grant Thornton said they were aware and deeply concerned about the allegations surrounding eFishery and are working to understand the full extent of the situation. He added the company is committed to maintaining audit quality and integrity. PwC Indonesia declined to comment and referred to a previous statement on its website which said it had never issued an independent audit report for any eFishery company.

For the Series B fundraising, according to Gibran, 20 separate farmers were visited while around 70 farmers were checked for the Series C fundraising. But he said the firms doing the due diligence, whose identities Bloomberg hasn’t confirmed, drew from a database of farms provided by eFishery and told the startup which they planned to visit, aside from a relatively small number of random spot checks. This gave Gibran a chance to prepare the ground. Gibran says that local area managers were given fact sheets detailing the numbers to tell visitors and they in turn briefed farmers; the rest was left to luck.

The same problems that make Indonesia such a challenging market can also hamper attempts to audit companies. The country is made up of over 17,000 islands and much of the work is done in rural settings where even detailed addresses aren’t enough, requiring help from farmers just to reach the front door.

The Fall

Despite the hype being fed to investors, some people within the company were aware of the true situation. According to Gibran and several former employees, the vast majority of its workforce only had the internal set of books and never knew that external money managers had a totally different set of numbers.

At this stage, with investors being sold a tale of slowing growth to concentrate on being financially sustainable ahead of a public listing, Gibran made plans to try and fix the business. He labelled it Project MEGA — Make eFishery Great Again.

It was a Hail Mary, one former employee said. Draft proposals reviewed by Bloomberg News showed that eFishery hoped to more than halve its losses before tax to 107 billion rupiah, reduce overdue loans on its Kabayan program and get more farmers to use its technology.

The company also wanted more farmers to buy and sell more fish through them. But they had a mountain to climb: Out of over 28,000 fish and shrimp farmers in their Kabayan system, about half were inactive. Another 7,000 had frozen accounts, the documents showed. Meanwhile, more than 90% of eFishery’s revenue came from businesses with less than 2% of gross profit margin.

The trigger for the collapse, according to a subsequent internal report, was a whistleblower complaint alleging financial misconduct sent to a board member in late November 2024. But some former employees suggest the circumstances could’ve been more mundane — copies of internal numbers had been sent to a director around then so it may have initially been a case of two confused individuals trying to understand why their numbers were so different.

On Dec. 6, Gibran said he was called in by the board, who informed him they had received documents from a whistleblower that showed differences in revenue as well as the number of tech products used by farmers.

He went back home and reflected. “That was the, I think the scariest part, the most unstable phase of myself,” he said. He couldn’t sleep that night, Gibran said. He was sad for what happened, and afraid, for what was to come.

On the afternoon of Dec. 9, Gibran gathered his heads of departments at a meeting room on the third floor of the company’s headquarters. Some 14 of them sat around a large oval table, while Gibran stood in front, by the side of the room. He told them what had happened. Some of the senior managers already knew of the inflated figures, Gibran told Bloomberg News. Others didn’t. At that meeting, which lasted around two to three hours, he fielded questions and then departed without knowing whether the company would continue in some form.

“There’s still hope but not for me. I know that this is the end of my chapter at the very least,” he said.

On Dec. 11, Gibran said he came clean to Novogratz, the co-founder of Aqua-Spark and one of eFishery’s board members, in a 30-minute recorded Zoom call. She was one of the company’s first investors and he regarded her as a mentor. Novogratz seemed gravely disappointed in him, Gibran recounted.

A couple of days later on Dec. 13, Gibran was summoned by the Steering Committee of eFishery's board and told he would be suspended. A new interim chief executive and chief financial officer took control of eFishery, including its bank accounts.

The Fallout

Sometime in the middle of December, things at Suganda’s fish farm in Cirebon began to fall apart. One by one, the eFeeders in his collective broke down. Normally he would seek help from an eFishery technician who was always on standby but when Suganda called, the technician said he had been laid off and there was no one left.

By the time Bloomberg News visited the farm on a cloudy Tuesday in the middle of March, a mix of working and stagnant ponds dotted the silent plain, punctuated only by the afternoon call to prayer and occasional motorcycle.

The eFishery devices stood abandoned in place, over a decade of tech development and global funding now little more than dumb buckets used to store fishing nets or feed. Suganda’s back to manual labor, forcing him to downsize the number of ponds he can manage. His monthly income has dwindled to around $180 at best, having been forced to sell much of his inventory at reduced prices.

“Without it, it is a huge loss. Labor efficiency is lost,” he said of the feeders. “Tech helped me to have a social life. But now I’m back to just overseeing the ponds.”

Suganda is back to manual labor, forcing him to downsize the number of ponds he can manage.Photographer: Rosa Panggabean/Bloomberg

And for Indonesia itself, where markets are already spooked over the populist policies of the new president, the demise of a poster-child company risks dampening the flow of new capital, reawakening questions about whether the traditional venture capitalist model really works in emerging markets.

“In the next one or two years, there will be a slowdown of $50 million to $100 million checks,” said Weisheng Neo, partner at Southeast Asia venture capital firm Qualgro Partners. “These investors aren’t going to go away entirely, but they’re just not going to invest in similar companies for a while — those that are super heavy on execution, with not much core assets and with a high cash burn.”

Investors are still debating how to wrap the company up. The board has hired FTI Consulting Singapore Pte. to review the business and take over management of the company. In a presentation to investors, seen by Bloomberg News, it concluded that “eFishery is not commercially viable in its current form.” FTI has recommended the business be wound down and what money is left returned to investors. There isn’t much. For example, Abu Dhabi’s 42X, which invested $100 million in the April 2023 round, may get just $8.3 million back two years later.

FTI declined to comment. Lunate, which now manages 42X's assets, declined to comment.

The company has all but folded with the vast majority of staff laid off and many of its machines being scrapped by recyclers for about $6 each, according to people familiar with the matter. The illusion that Gibran built over 13 years took less than three months to collapse.

One lingering question is what exactly happened to all the money. Although the FTI report does suggest that some employees siphoned money, and Gibran drew a salary and bonus commensurate with a much larger company, he seems to live a fairly modest life. One employee said he used to drive to the office in a Hyundai Ioniq 5. Indonesia’s corporate history is replete with tycoons fleeing abroad with millions of investor dollars but he remains in Bandung — the second-tier city where he based the startup to save on costs. None of his detractors has produced evidence he embezzled money.

Gibran swears he didn’t take the missing funds. He says it all went to hiring talent, allocating commissions and paying off debtors.

But while the founder talks of weighing the moral ledger, despite all his reasonings and philosophical justifications, there were countless opportunities for him to come clean or cease accepting new money. The fatal flaw in his trolley problem analogy is that he could’ve hit the brakes and choose to run over no one.

Gibran’s own future, right now, looks like his past. He’s working with his shrimp-farming brother and has started a frozen food business. And he’s trying to support efforts by former staff to create new fish farming collectives. Longer term, it is more murky. The Indonesian police didn’t respond to a request for comment on the status of any investigation, but the inquiry by FTI is still ongoing and he faces possible legal action from investors, according to people familiar with the matter.

As for why he did it, the answer seems to be a mix of desperation, ego and circumstance.

“In hindsight I wanted to create a big impact — to create a dent in the universe — without thinking if my impact should instead be long-lasting, even if it’s smaller," he said.